A well organized kitchen is a pleasure to work in. You know exactly where things are, nothing irrelevant is eating up your counter space and you don’t have to turn the place up-side down to look for a serving spoon. A poorly organized kitchen, on the other hand, can be a bad (with a capital ‘B’) place to be in – both physically and mentally. Not only do you take longer to get even the simplest tasks done, you also end up disliking your kitchen space and work in it rather reluctantly. Hopefully, with these 7 efficient ideas to organize your kitchen well, we can reignite the spark and make you fall in love with working in your kitchen all over again!

1. Kitchen Counters

The counter space in the kitchen is the most likely place of all for your clutter to land up in. Small appliances, knives, cookery books, oil, spices, decorative items…virtually everything finds its way up there. To organize your kitchen well, here’s what you do. Keep only the most essential appliances on the countertop and find another place for everything else that you don’t use every day. Keep decorative items to a bare minimum and let the functionality of the kitchen do all the talking.

2. Kitchen

Clutter-free, well organized kitchen cabinets translate into a hassle-free cooking experience. So, the first thing you’d do is classify everything in the cabinets into two groups – stuff you use frequently and those that you don’t.The latter goes into all the hard-to-reach cabinets. The former must be classified according to their use, like pots and pans in one drawer, dinnerware in another, the mixing bowls in the third, all your plastic wraps, food storage bags, dish towels, and foils in one place and so on and so forth.

3. There’s no Place for a Junk Drawer

All of us have one in our house – the junk drawer where all kinds of odds and ends get chucked in. Anything you can’t find a use for but are reluctant to throw away coz there might be a possible purpose for it in the future goes into the junk drawer. Knick-knacks, bric-a-brac that don’t fit into any other category are dumped into a junk drawer. While a junk drawer may start off as one of the more efficient ideas to organize your kitchen wall; it soon turns into a disaster. The simplest thing to do is of course avoid having one, but if you are hung up on it anyway, make sure you clean it out regularly and trash anything that you aren’t using.

4. Organizing Space around the Dishwasher

Unloading your dishwasher everyday can be a nightmare if you do not have a fixed place for all your dishes. To make life easy create a dish storage corner for your everyday dishes and place it as close as possible to the sink or dishwasher. You can also place your detergent and dish towels here so they are within easy reach. For more convenience, have a sliding utility basket installed under the kitchen sink and use this to keep your scouring pads, detergents and dish towels.

5. Storing Dishes

Unless you have a massive kitchen with oodles of unused space you need to keep only one set of glasses, dishes, and utensils in the kitchen for yourself and your family. The duplicate sets and fancy cutlery should be moved out of the kitchen into another storage area, for instance the buffet in the dining room. Same goes for extra tablecloths, place mats, candlesticks, and breadbaskets. This efficient way to organize your kitchen will give you instant space!

6. Food Preparation Workspace

Designate the longest available countertop or the biggest corner of the kitchen as your food preparation workspace. Ideally this workspace should be between the stove and the sink or the fridge and the sink. Or, better still, if you can work it out like this, somewhere in the center of the triangle made by the stove, sink, and fridge. This is where you are going to chop, cut, slice, dice, mix, season, and marinade all the ingredients. You can make this an even more efficient workspace by having cupboards above and below it to store your measuring cups, knives, mixing bowls, spoons, cutting boards, blenders, and anything else that is most commonly used in the preparatory stages of cooking.

7. Storing the Food

Coming to the last item on our list of efficient ideas to organize your kitchen well – how to store the food. Organize all the food in the kitchen well and you will be spared the ordeal of looking for the right sort of sauce or spice in the middle of cooking something on the gas. The food storage corner should be ideally next to the fridge where you place all your food, including canned food, boxed goods, spices, cereals, breads, jars, and bottles. When all your food is in one place, cooking becomes a snap and the kitchen looks really tidy.

The kitchen is the heart of any house a well planned and systematically arranged kitchen makes housekeeping really easy and takes a load of your mind. What’s more – the hectic lives we lead these days make it even more imperative that you pay attention to these 7 efficient ideas to organize your kitchen well. What do you do to keep your kitchen in ship-shape?